The Crossroad before the Cross

TEXT:   LUKE 22: 39-54

Before he came to the cross, Jesus came to a crossroad: a decisive moment, a tipping point, a choice.

Before Jesus hung from a tree, the future of God’s kingdom hung in the balance in a garden of olive trees.

Before he suffered and died at Calvary, Jesus suffered as he prayed in Gethsemane.

Luke’s Gospel tells us that “in his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:44).

The bloody crucifixion may seem the hardest test Jesus faced. But maybe what happened in Gethsemane was harder.  Certainly it was not Jesus’ first test. Remember his ministry began with Satan’s testing in the wilderness. Don’t forget the relentless testing by scribes and Pharisees wanting to trap him into saying words that would warrant arrest. But Jesus’ final test was in a prayer garden. After that, he was out of options.  Jesus was mainly silent during his trial.  He endured torture.  He met his death.  But in Gethsemane he was still playing out possibilities before making a decision, a choice. He prayed, he discerned, he sought God’s will. And that process was agonizing.

We don’t know all the options Jesus agonized over once he realized his arrest was imminent. One option would have been to rouse the crowds for bloody insurrection. But his previous choices had prepared him to choose the path of peace at this critical juncture.

Now some scientists and philosophers may question if humans have real choice, so “programmed” are we by genetic codes and cultural conditioning and environmental influences. They think we may THINK we’re choosing when we in fact are responding predictably to other influences.  But evolution requires the role of chance.  This dance between chance and choice, predictable laws and randomness, may mean our lives follow some kind of trajectory, but we’re not confined to a script.

Have you seen the movie The Adjustment Bureau? Matt Damon plays a budding politician who falls in love with a beautiful woman through a chance encounter on a city bus. But their meeting was not meant to happen.  Because the “Bureau” that secretly determines all major human decisions on our planet and has been positioning Matt Damon’s character to gain political power-- hadn’t mapped out the possibility of love for him. The “Bureau” fears the young woman will distract the aspiring politician from achieving his political potential. So they make course corrections on the young politician’s map which prevent him from seeing her again. “The Bureau” of men in business suits and hats has that kind of power. They literally pull out maps to chart the lives of human beings—mainly with the benign intention of exerting some control over our tendency to blow up the planet.  Maybe the “Adjustment Bureau” represents God in a fedora, or fate, or simply the succession of choices that seem like choices but really aren’t.  The film calls into question how much choice we really have. But it also suggests that love is always a possibility.

If our choices are more limited than we like to think, it may be because our previous choices have narrowed our current options. As Robert Frost said, “way leads on to way.” We can think of our lives as the sum of our many choices which test our convictions and shape our souls and prepare us for the bigger tests in life.  You responded today—to someone else’s comment or to the lure of some habit or to an opportunity to act with kindness—because of earlier responses to life’s tests. You’ll act tomorrow because of some choice you made today. Surgeons and airline pilots and soldiers and astronauts are trained to make life-and-death decisions instantaneously.

You and I make seemingly minor decisions—not the big Gethsemane choices—every day.  In doing so, we are wiring our minds and hearts for future actions.  Each choice—for steamed broccoli instead of French fries, for kindness rather than criticism—each choice paves the way for the next.  And thus a life is made.

Now some tell the Jesus Story as if there were no choices.  As if God’s inexorable plan of salvation was to implant in a human child a suicide directive.  They believe Jesus’s purpose was to be executed—as if Jesus were an ancient version of the Manchurian Candidate, groomed for leadership and programmed to “self-destruct” in the service of a bigger cause.

I do not believe God mapped out Jesus’s life so that it ended on a cross. As I’ve said, I believe that Jesus, his culture, the authorities, and the crowd made all sorts of choices that resulted in his crucifixion.  I do not believe that violence was God’s choice or plan. We may justify our hate or make a tragedy comprehensible by ascribing such events to the will of God. But a god of love does not cause suffering.

 

As we enter Holy Week again, I repeat from this pulpit a statement contrary to what some of us were taught: God’s “plan of salvation” did not require violence. You may believe otherwise. That’s okay. We don’t require theological uniformity among us.  But I stress this point because harm can come from the idea that Father God sent his son into the world to die as a sacrifice so that God could finally forgive the sins of the other children. This theology reinforces the pernicious falsehood that violence can end violence. It makes God either cruel or stupid. Did we not hear Jesus shout, “No more of this” to the disciple who pulled his sword in the garden?  Have we not known God best through Jesus who died rather than harm another?  How could God, creator of the universe’s laws, build into that universe an equation that one man must suffer before forgiveness can be offered to the others?  The cross is a consequence of a violent humanity, not the intention of a loving God. If we worship a violent God, then we will justify our own violence.  Jesus risked the possibility of his own violent death in order to live fully into the way of nonviolence.

As we enter Holy Week, I imagine Christ continuing to experience agony when we trust in violence rather than love. I imagine that we perpetuate Jesus’ suffering on the cross by worshiping a God who requires a sacrificial death in order to forgive her beloved children. 

  

When Jesus learned Judas had betrayed him, he could have fled or gathered revolutionaries. One of his followers chose the Empire’s way and drew his sword in the garden of prayer.  And the sword drew blood.  And you can imagine what normally would have happened next.  Instead of arresting and executing one man, the temple police would have drawn their swords, and soon the garden where Jesus went to pray would have been a battlefield.

Instead, Jesus practiced what he’d preached.  He refused to be drawn into violence.  In fact, he did the opposite.  He reflexively healed the man his disciple wounded.

If he’d been a fanatical martyr, Jesus would likely have rushed headlong into that death with some ferocity of resolve, some exultation about his mission, some shout of triumph in the name of his God.

 

Instead, Jesus sounded more like Martin Luther King, Jr., (who sounded a bit like Jesus, of course) both of whom recognized what their witness to God’s love might cost. He/they might have hoped that, if death came, it would serve to illustrate God’s love more powerfully than their sermons about peace ever had. But Jesus truly had a choice. Over and over he had chosen how to live and love, how to seek God’s way rather than the Empire’s way--long before his cruel death exposed the vileness of the Empire in the most decisive contrast between God’s way of love and the Empire’s way of domination.

I have given up the God who requires violence and suffering. But I’ve also given up the God who removes suffering.  Because it’s plain to see that suffering still exists.  I’ve forsaken the God who uses the suffering of one poor soul for the salvation of another—and the God who intervenes to make sure I won’t ever suffer.  I turn instead to the God who suffers with us. Who stands by us if we suffer.  As Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, there are some creative ways to return good for evil that do NOT require our very lives.  But when all the creative nonviolent options were gone, Jesus’s choice to die rather than to kill, to feel hurt rather than to wound, is a hopeful choice.  To choose to suffer rather than to perpetuate the cycle of violence is a choice that NO ONE HAS TO MAKE---if we ALL make that choice. Hear that paradox again:  If we ALL choose to suffer from violence rather than commit violence, then NO ONE ever has to suffer from violence again.

 

Next Sunday we’ll return to another garden setting.  Our Hebrew Bible reading will take us to Eden, brimming with first life.  Our Gospel reading will take us to the garden where Jesus was raised to new life.

 

But this evening we have read of a Garden that could have become a battlefield, that did become a testing place, a dark place, but an oddly victorious place where Jesus, despite death threats and darkness, lived into the way of light.  Shouting to his followers, he cried, “No more of this violence!” Shouting to those arresting him, he accused: “This is YOUR hour, and the power of darkness!”  He exposed the injustice. He named the darkness.  He named it.  He did not deepen the darkness by adopting their tactics. He diverted from their script.

Jesus had been tested long before the cross.  By the time of his arrest, he was clear eyed and focused. He knew who he was and what he must do.  His reflex was healing.  He would not fight. He would not flee. As the temple police pressed forward, Jesus had to trust the God whose power is love.  Without knowing if or how someone might tell the end of his story, he walked to the cross ready to commend his spirit to a loving God. 

Before Jesus came to the cross, he came to a crossroad.  We will make a thousand choices tomorrow, most of them seemingly insignificant.  This is not a call to overthink, to be anxious about minor decisions, to feel overly responsible.  This is a call to appreciate that all of life is bound up together—and that love is the direction Jesus always took—to the cross and beyond.

PRAYER: Loving One, in our darkness, call us to the Light.  In our quandaries, lead us to peace.   In our hurting, stay beside us until Easter dawns.

Cross Purposes

TEXT:  Luke 19: 28-48 and Luke 22-23

Because we’ve compressed all of Holy Week into this one day, you may now be experiencing spiritual whiplash. We started meditatively in the 4:00 hour with the somber Stations of the Cross. Then this worship service began jubilantly with our Palm Sunday processional.  Now we are back at the cross, the darkest moment in the Christian year, the "crux" of the Christian story and faith.  But maybe the wildly veering emotions of Holy Week are best experienced in the liturgical equivalent of time-elapsed photography.  To move abruptly with Jesus from his triumphal entry in Jerusalem to his betrayal, arrest, trial, torture, and death—to hear the cheers turn to jeers over the course of mere minutes—may allow us to fully appreciate the fleeting capacity for human devotion, the fearsome power of mob mentality, and the truest meaning of the cross.

I must say, however, that I would prefer NOT to preach about the cross. It has caused too much confusion and conflict.  I would prefer NOT to preach about the crucifixion. It is a horrific act that has sometimes been memorialized in ways that glorify violence. At times I feel about sermons on the crucifixion the way some people feel about the media attention given to mass murderers.  The less said, the better.

But Holy Week is upon us. The cross demands that even progressive Christians like us answer for this dangerous symbol, acknowledge this dark event, and align ourselves with this crucified Jesus. The cross still has power. And we can contribute to either its harmful or its healing effects.  The cross is never neutral.

If you think the cross of Christ harmed only one man, Jesus, over 2000 years ago, then you have not seen the injurious way others continue to use it.  From the Crusader's cross that led Christian soldiers onward to slay people of other faiths—to the KKK's fiery crosses that terrorized people for their racial or religious differences, the cross has sometimes been used to sponsor and sanctify violence.  When women and minorities have been counseled to just accept injustice because "we all have our crosses to bear," the cross of Christ has been used to silence and intimidate.

And in more subtle ways, the cross sometimes inadvertently promotes violence because our culture's most popular Christian interpretation of the cross says it’s an instrument of God's righteous anger. That’s a problem because as your God behaves, so you behave. For many, the cross teaches that God required innocent blood to be spilled to pay for the sins you and I have committed, sins for which the penalty is eternal punishment in hell. 

It’s understandable that Jesus’s first followers immediately began trying to make sense of their beloved leader’s death, so various theologies developed early to construct meaning for Jesus’s undeserved death.  But the Church never settled on one theology of the cross.  Perhaps the most common explanation today for Jesus’s death is often called sacrificial or penal or substitutionary atonement theology, a branch of Christian soteriology which posits that the life of a completely innocent human was the price a just God required to forgive human sins. 

Certainly this theology “preaches well.”[i]  The gruesome details of Jesus’s torture can evoke sympathy in all but the most heartless.  Add to that story the explanation that he endured all of that so that we could be spared eternal torture—and we are moved from compassion for this innocent man to guilty gratitude.   “He suffered for YOUR sake,” the preacher accuses.  “Imagine that crown of thorns pressing into YOUR brow.  Imagine those nails being driven into YOUR hands and feet.” We proceed through the stations of the cross or a sermon about the cross wincing at each blow.  There is power in such preaching. Power. Or manipulation.

That’s not a sermon I can preach.  I cannot.  The problem with that interpretation of the cross is that it describes a rigid God whose punishment for any and every sin is the death penalty, but who will allow an innocent to stand in for the guilty.  The problem with substitutionary atonement is that God the Parent and God the Son are fractured into the punisher and the punished in ways that strain the unity of Trinitarian theology.  The problem with this theology is that the God Jesus served in order to usher in a kingdom of peace is a God who resorts to violence.   

But the God we’ve seen Jesus pointing to, as we’ve been reading through Luke’s Gospel this year, is a God who blesses the peacemakers, who is pictured as a forgiving father of a prodigal son who welcomes home the lost one without any punishment, much to the consternation of the son who never strayed.  Today’s reading similarly underscores Jesus’s rejection of violence, even as his enemies plot his death.  When the temple police come to arrest him and a disciple defends Jesus by cutting off the ear of a man in the arresting party, Jesus rebukes both those arresting him and his own disciples drawing swords to defend him.  “No more of this!” he cries (Luke 22:51).  No more of this cycle of violence, he says with his own death.  We cannot end violence with violence.

And as he hung from the cross, Jesus forgave and empathized with his torturers, realizing they did not know what they were doing (Luke 23:34).  If Jesus is the human face of God, then God is not interested in retributive justice.  God is interested in restorative justice that offers the possibility of restoring relationships and transforming lives.  Certainly there are consequences for sin, but if Jesus is our best revelation of God, then the Gospels completely contradict a theology that says Jesus had to pay for our sins with his life.  The cross is what humanity does.  Jesus’s forgiveness is what God does—and what we can do by God’s grace and Jesus’s example.

I cannot preach a message of the cross that Christ suffered in my stead.  In fact, I agree with Charles Hefling that “it is the other way around. [Jesus] accepted [the cross] because we have to.  His was a cross that had always been ours, the one way open to us, in a skewed world, for putting a stop to the consequences of our own malice without adding to them—an appeal for us to follow him by willingly taking up whatever crosses the world imposes” and  “forgiving.”  By the power of God’s Loving Spirit still at work for peace in this world, we can reject retaliation.  We can follow Jesus’s third way—which is neither the way of violence nor the way of passive acceptance of injustice but instead is the way of creative, transformative nonviolence.[ii]  Sometimes that way does lead to a physical death. Always it leads to a dying of false values and a false self and the rebirth of a truer self in union with Christ. 

The cross is how God in Christ Jesus entered into our human suffering, so the cross also draws us into solidarity with all others who suffer.  It is a terrible calling—to stand with those who suffer.  But it is how WE are saved—from our own egos, our isolated little lives, our sense that we are the center of the universe. 

The cross can save the world.  It shouts to us that violence can never end violence, and our world will never be safe until we learn that.  The cross instructs us in forgiveness, in compassion for neighbor and for creation.  It widens the door to the kingdom of peace, our saving hope.  It shows that God is all-sufficient.  To misread the cross and turn it into a symbol of divine violence is dangerous theology.  Preaching AGAINST sacrificial atonement theology is, I believe, an important corrective to popular Christianity.

Nearly two years ago we began, with Todd’s excellent leadership, a process to create Open Table’s logo. I initially hoped we would not use a cross in our logo because of the bad theology that often gets associated with that most traditional symbol of Christianity.  It’s just so hard to say, with a silent symbol, that WE view the cross differently. But the stylized, modernized, subtle cross in our logo mitigates against associations with “The Old Rugged Cross.” And the truth is, even progressive congregations that don’t hang out a literal cross or don’t use it prominently must still grapple with the theology of the cross. 

Oddly enough, you may have noticed that Open Table’s logo has been fading away from the front page of our worship bulletins.  And oddly enough, it’s the cross that is no longer visible.  I promise this has not been my intent.  I’m trying to find a way to correct my technical problem with our logo’s jpg image.  But it’s an unintended irony that I’m speaking today about the primary Christian symbol at a time when it has disappeared from our worship bulletins.  To paraphrase Robert Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love a cross.”

You know, I’m a little envious of the symbols of other world religions.  Other folks went with images of beauty and light:  a 6-pointed star for Judaism, a crescent moon for Islam, a lotus for Buddhism. Christianity’s symbol?  An instrument of death.[iii]  Who was in charge of our marketing 2000 years ago? There have been other Christian symbols over the centuries—like earliest symbol, the ichthus (fish).  The cross didn’t gain prominence for several centuries.  New Christian symbols may emerge in the future.

Maybe we should gather some focus groups and hire Todd to create a new logo for ALL of Christianity and do a rebranding. This symbol has been taken too literally, has stirred up vengefulness when its purpose was the opposite, has been appropriated for some bad stuff.  This image is at cross purposes with its intent. 

The cross’s beneficence, of course, can’t be rightly judged on this side of Easter.  On this side of Easter, it may seem, for now, the cross produces only death. 

But Jesus bet everything on that cross, maintaining faith in God’s nonviolent love.  Recent translations of Paul’s epistles suggest we’ve perhaps not only misunderstood the meaning of the cross but also a key phrase in Christian theology.  Verses like Romans 3:22 have traditionally been translated to say that we are saved by having faith IN Jesus. But the preposition “in,” implicit in the original Greek phrase, can as easily be translated to mean we are saved by having the faith OF Jesus.  Many scholars now believe Paul was talking about living faithfully, as did Jesus, who trusted absolutely in God’s nonviolent love.  The cross saves if it strengthens our faithfulness to God’s loving ways. 

As our service concludes tonight, we'll extinguish the Christ candle, another fitting symbol since Jesus is the Light of the World.  We’ll extinguish the candle not because we believe Christ's presence is absent from us, not because our faith has dimmed, but because we're recalling a dark time in human history when it perhaps seemed that love had been conquered by hate. 

The cross seemed to have obliterated all that was good.  But it’s too early to know if the cross was ultimately salvific—for you, for me.  It’s too early in the history of humanity, too early in the liturgical year, to know if the kingdom of peace has a chance.  But come back next Sunday.  Maybe by the dawning of Easter light we’ll see the cross marking a moment that is not about pay back but about paying it forward.  Maybe Easter will tell us the rest of the story. 

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[i] Hefling, Charles.  “Why the Cross? God’s At-one-ment with Humanity” The Christian Century (11 March 2013). www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-02/why-cross. 

[ii] This idea of Jesus’s third way is from Wink, Walter.  The Powers That Be. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

[iii] Buechner, Frederick.  “Cross” in Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC.   New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. 21.